An "Antique Version of Myself"

By Richard N. Ostling

The ultra-Orthodox movement in Judaism known as Hasidism is alien and vaguely unsettling to some Gentiles and even to many modernized Jews. Hasidic men, bearded, black-hatted and clad in severe dark suits, take to their streets to dance in spiritual celebration on joyous holy days. The strictly observant women dress to conceal their elbows and knees and cover their shorn hair with wigs. Members of tightly knit, Yiddish-speaking Hasidic communities, under the virtually absolute sway of a grand rabbi, preserve a way of life that began long ago in Eastern Europe.

Hasidim, in turn, are generally indifferent to or suspicious of outsiders. This makes all the more remarkable the achievement of Lis Harris, a secularized Jew and New Yorker staff writer, who worked her way into the Hasidic community and produced three lengthy articles for her magazine and a newly published book, Holy Days: The World of a Hasidic Family (Summit; 266 pages; $18.95).

Hasidism is a mystical movement, founded in the mid-18th century by a rabbi known as the Baal Shem Tov (Master of the Good Name). His teachings, which emphasized the immediacy of God's presence in everyday life, quickly swept through the shtetls of Eastern Europe. Today there are 200,000 Hasidim in the U.S., divided into about 40 "courts." After several of these communities rebuffed Harris, she turned to the Lubavitchers, named after the Belorussian village adopted as home by their founder. The group, led by Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, 83, blends the rational and emotional aspects of religion, and actively seeks to attract secularized Jews to Orthodoxy.

Harris eventually found a Lubavitcher couple willing to open their home to extended observation. Over four years, Harris visited them in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, N.Y., where 15,000 Lubavitchers live. The pseudonymous central figure of Harris' book is Housewife "Sheina Konigsberg," not a born-and-bred Hasid but a baalat teshuvah (female "returnee"). Financially comfortable and reared in a Jewish family that was only moderately observant, Sheina joined a supportive community of Lubavitchers in the Midwest after a divorce from her first husband. To the dismay of her children, Sheina subsequently entered an arranged marriage and moved to Brooklyn with Husband "Moshe," a widower with deep Lubavitcher roots.

Sheina is less imbued with Yiddish culture than most Lubavitcher women. Nonetheless, she voluntarily leads a highly regulated life prescribed by Jewish custom and law. "I'm here for a purpose," she says. "To see the beauty and holiness in everyday things. The key is in the Torah, and the way to get there has been shown us in a practical way by the mitzvot," the 613 commandments that define traditional Jewish practice. In Lubavitcher thinking, all matter is filled with holiness, and even minor deeds help prepare for the coming of the Messiah.

Besides Sheina's homelife, Harris depicts a series of community scenes: an outdoor wedding capped by the bride's energetic dance with other women while the groom prances in an adjacent room with the men; a beehive-like bakery where workers scurry to produce matzoh under the prescribed limit of 18 minutes; a farbrengen (gathering), where Rabbi Schneerson preaches extemporaneously for hours to a room packed with followers, while the women crowd behind dark Plexiglas in an upstairs gallery.

The particulars of strict Orthodox observance fill the Lubavitchers' lives. At the mikvah (ritual bath), in which a woman immerses herself after her menstrual period, dental floss and cotton swabs are provided for removal of the tiniest particles so purifying water will wash the entire body. One evening, Harris undergoes the first ritual bath of her life, an experience that produces a momentary touch of Hasidic ecstasy as memories well up of her grandmother and the two sons Harris has borne.

Though the Lubavitchers are oblivious to feminist concerns, Harris sees humaneness in their way of life and says women create an almost "Amazonian" sisterhood among themselves. Men honor their wives, and there is no observable infidelity.

Why devote years of effort to the Hasidim? Harris contends that they once constituted three-fourths of East European Jews and consequently a majority of U.S. Jews probably have Hasidic forebears. "I felt like putting them back in the world in some manner," says Harris, adding that they "represent some antique version of myself."

The author ends her project with mixed feelings about the Hasidim. "I'm more attracted to Judaism because of them," she says, but she sees little appeal in their way of life. As someone who believes in God but is also assimilated, remarks Harris, "I did not like the Lubavitchers' rigidity, the absoluteness of right and wrong that they perceived. I consider unsureness to be the proper condition of life." --By Richard N. Ostling. Reported by Michael P. Harris/New York

With reporting by Reported by Michael P. Harris/New York